Facebook Algorithm Update Focuses on Quality

Association of Strategic Marketing December 4, 2013 — 1,520 views

Facebook, the well-known social networking site, has made a major change to its news feed algorithm. The change will ensure that the content that shows up in the news feed is more relevant to the particular user’s interests and likes.

For many years, calls were being made for Facebook to revamp its news feed. Many felt that it was old and unwieldy and did not meet the expectations of the users. Now it looks like Facebook is finally making its move to update the news feed.

The News Feed

The news feed is an important part of Facebook. It is the Facebook home page for most people. It curates the updates made by the friends of the Facebook users and makes them appear in a chronological and linear order on a single page. This makes it easy for the users to follow everything that is going on in their friends’ lives. Most users like to obsessively watch over their friends. And the news feed makes it very easy to do so.

The news feed drives most of the traffic that Facebook receives. Most of the time spent by users on the site is spent on reading their news feeds.

The New Algorithm

Over time, the news feed became cluttered for most people. Most people had too many friends, which meant that their news feed was moving too fast for them to keep up with it. Another thing that happened was that many unfunny memes started appearing in the news feeds. This was creating a backlash among the users.

To solve all these problems, Facebook started working on a new algorithm for its news feed. The algorithm has been announced and will soon become a part of the Facebook experience. The new algorithm categorizes the friends into those are closest and those who are not so close to you. The updates made by close friends are now given a higher priority in the news feed.

The new news feed also takes into account the geographical location of the user. The user can now get more information about his place of residence based on his location and can also learn about deals and discounts that local businesses have to offer.

It is expected that the new news feed will make Facebook more engaging for the users. It might also attract more users to the site. The site had begun seeing a decline in new user registration, but the improved news feed algorithm may just change that.